


The First Bear

by redsnake05



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Creation Myth, Gen, Panserbjørne, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsnake05/pseuds/redsnake05
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many ways for Dust to wake a people. This is one way that the Bears stopped existing and started living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Bear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Nebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Nebula/gifts).



Long ago, when the world was newer and sharper, the first of all Bears lived. In those days, the ice was white and the snow heaped high on black branches, just as it does now. The sea was green and cold and the seals fat and sleek. The night sky was black and the stars bright, and the bears mostly ignored them. If they couldn't eat it or fight it, why would they bother to look at it? The bears knew the cyclings of nature without thinking, and they existed like that for many long ages. It wasn't until the other lights came, green and violet and red in great shimmering waves in the sky, that anything changed in the world.

The first Bear didn't have a name then, for all Bears were animals. They snarled and fought and ate seals, just as we do, but they had no speech, for they could tell each other of the desire to mate and the desire to fight without words. They had no armour and their claws did not make things. They slept through the long winter night and ate during the long summer day, and in between they raised cubs. They saw the world in white snow, green sea, and long black night. This was existence.

One day, the first Bear climbed to the top of the tallest peak on Svalbard and looked up at the sky. The Last Sun had just set in the sky and the long night was come, though she didn't name it then. She felt no desire for sleep, so she looked up at the sky. It was alive with light and she felt something different inside herself. It wasn't hunger; she had just eaten. It wasn't rage, for nothing was threatening her and she had no cubs. It wasn't anything she had felt before. She turned it over and over in her mind, as you or I might turn over a piece of iron to truly understand what it might want to be. 

Now, before this night, she might have shrugged it off as bad fish and gone to look for some greenery to make herself sick before curling up in her cave and waiting for the First Sunrise. But something deep inside her was quickening in the chilly blaze of the lights in the sky: unfolding, flattening, smoothing out for shaping. She sat on the snow and watched the sky, just as we are doing now.

I don't know how long she sat and watched the sky for. Perhaps it was all the long winter night; no one really knows. Perhaps it was even longer. She breathed in and out, letting the new thing inside her grow in peace under the sky, in harmony with the lights and the stars and the deep black of the night.

Eventually, the sky lit up with an even brighter trail of light, a streak through the sky that plunged straight towards her, and she stood up and watched it approach. It grew bigger and the air around her sizzled, but she was not afraid for she knew it was something to do with this new feeling inside her. So she watched the bright light hurtle down, and when it hit she went flying backwards into a great snow drift. She was up again in a moment and down the hill a moment after that, wanting to see what the sky lights had given her.

In a smoking crater, surrounded by broken trees and rocks, she found it. A twisted, steaming hot rock, but she picked it up in her claws and turned it over and over and she found that she knew what to do with it. She looked back up at the sky and the swirling colours, and she realised what the feeling was. This new feeling was _herself_. She clutched the cooling sky-iron and snarled at the sky, the first of the Panserbjørne.

Many things have been discovered since then. We learned to speak. We made fires, and these became forges and furnaces. We shape rock and sky-iron into the things they need to be, and we use them to make the things we must have. We're still discovering; for now Bears are talking about Dust and what it means and does. Most importantly, though, we make our armour and take it on and off at will. The idea of the shape is inside us when we are born, but we try different designs and sizes in our head as we grow.

All this possibility of knowing and being, the first Bear saw in a lump of raw sky-iron, and the song of her snarl was the sound of birthing. She came alive then, into an inheritance of white snow and green sea and black night, and she added to that the hot red metal that shapes us as much as we shape it. 

Those were wild days. There was much to see and do and make, and the Bears - for the first Bear had found others, and there was a second and a third, and maybe a hundredth, before someone made names - were busy with their labours. They shaped what it means to be alive, to be a Bear.

Eventually, though, it was time for the first Bear to make something else new that no one had done before, and so she made Death. At least, bears had always died from old age, or disease, or a fight, but they had simply crawled away and lain down and stopped. The first Bear, she made her way to the crater where she had found her sky-iron, and there she put it down at last. Then, gathering all her fading strength, she climbed to the top of the highest peak on Svalbard, and looked at the sky one last time. She reared up on her hind legs and snarled once more to the sky, and it was the sound of unmaking.

The first Bear crumpled to the ground, and there her body stayed and fed the earth, as is the natural way of things. But, because she was the first, she also leapt into the air and soared up into the black, carried on the plumes of northern lights They wrapped her up in green and red and violet and lifted her away. She stretched out her claws and ran through the sky; up, up, up, until the earth was tiny below her. There she is still, and you can see her - there, see her tail? She's there in the sky, living and making and being, just as we are below. One day, our armour will go back to the ground, and our bodies will go back to the ground, but we will always leap up, into the sky, to follow the first Bear, for we are the Panserbjørne.


End file.
